


Think I Know Why The Dog Howls At The Moon

by Merixcil



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Harley Quinn (Comics)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Character Study, Domestic Violence, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, blink and you miss it Joker angst, this is a Harley fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 11:39:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14164044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Harley tries to pretend that everything's going just the way she planned.





	Think I Know Why The Dog Howls At The Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Please double check the tags on this one - the relationships herein are far from healthy. Also be aware that while this fic explores the tagged relationships it does not even begin to argue in favour of either of them.

Knowing where to put your hands on the neck of a slavering dog is one thing, training it to be anything other than what it is, is quite another. Harley’s not stupid, but her psychology doctorate can’t help her now. The years poking around in other people’s bad habits have made her petty; if they’re allowed to give up on themselves then why can’t she?

The Joker looks up at skies not dark enough to be night and too bright to be real. He smiles, he laughs, he socks her in the gut as an afterthought and his eyes never really settle on her face. Their strongest connection is violent and physical and moves almost entirely in one direction. Not that Harley doesn’t like violence, not that she doesn’t see the appeal of smashing faces into concrete and laughing at the resulting concussions, but it’s hard to let herself get an upper hand against him.

“What are you waiting for?” Joker snarls when she’s thirty seconds late to get the TV set up for their evening shows. He’s really into the classic comedies just now, the black and white ones with a live studio audience. Harley sits at his feet and laughs along, because they are sorta funny and he expects her to.

The old TV in the warehouse they're shacked up in flickers and splutters around parts that have been kept in use for far too long. It spits out dialogue with increasing muddiness. “One of these days, pow! Straight to the moon.” Some evenings they play along with the characters on screen in real time, and Harley comes away with a shiny new black eye, blooming underneath her makeup as they take to the streets in stitches.

They leave explosives dotted around the city, in trash cans and behind complex bolted doors. Joker screams in frustration when Harley puts his bombs together at the wrong angle. She’s long since given up trying to explain to him that all her time spent at university was dedicated to the study of the mind, not chemistry.

The Bat always finds them when they least expect him, and when he does neither he nor Joker ever really look at Harley. The world around the two of them shrinks to something she can’t squeeze in to, she’s supposed to sit back and laugh at the show, or do her best to write Robin a one way ticket to the nearest morgue.

She doesn’t though. Not now, not ever. Not when the Bat hits the man she loves square in the face, breaking his nose and the only thing Joker does in response is laugh. Harley grabs the boxing glove gun she’s been forbidden from touching and leaps into the fray, curling high over their heads in a motion she learned when she was fourteen, eyes firmly fixed on an aesthetics scholarship to somewhere prestigious and far away from the noisy, ever changing house she grew up in. She hits the trigger and the weighted glove soars straight into the Bat’s side, sending him flying into the wall hard enough to knock him out.

“C’mon, puddin’. Let’s get you home. Gotta fix up that gorgeous face.” Harley moves to get an arm round Joker’s waist to keep him steady.

He pushes her away. “Deary me, you insolent little twit. You just have to ruin everything, don’t you? I had him right where I wanted him.”

On the nights they’re not busy, Joker will head up to the roof to watch the bat signal glare down at him. Jaw slack, eyes wide. Harley goes out to watch him from the street and he never realises that she’s there.

So she moves out of sight on purpose, taking the carnation from the buttonhole of his most recently discarded jacket and pretending that he bought it for her. She pulls at the petals and watches them fall to the floor.

“He loves me.” She tells herself with confidence. He’s never said the words, but he wouldn’t put up with her if he didn’t.

“He loves you not.” The Bat smirks when she insists that The Joker will come to her rescue. Then he ties her to a lamppost for the GCPD to find.

The Bat is mean, his sense of humour disconcertingly dark. Joker talks about him like he’s oh so serious but that’s a surface level understanding of the Dark Knight. He’s just a beast, perfectly capable of finding entertainment in the squirming of his prey.

What do you know about love? Harley thinks around the gag in her mouth. If the Bat knew the first thing about what she feels, he wouldn’t be so cocky. He thinks she’s nuts, but his bad habits would be so much harder to kick than her own.

Joker drags the whole squad, not just Harley but the goons and his more terrified business associates, over to watch blurry home videos of Batman fighting other villains. He passes around popcorn flavoured with bubblegum and hot sauce and cheers every time and assailant gets a hit in. Eyes never leaving the mat black mystery of that face. Harley has never felt more stupid.

“Maybe we could get away some time.” She smiles, when they’re alone and the sun is shining and she knows that this is a good day.

Joker laughs in her face. “And go where, doll face? Where could be better than Gotham City?” But he lets her entertain him with tales of their long awaited wedding in Vegas, followed by a daring casino heist that would make the national news.

“We could take off with everything, Mister J. Really clean ‘em out. We’d be rich.”

“Come back to Gotham to live like kings.” Joker smiles a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes and for the first time in months Harley thinks he might actually be looking at her. “I see where you’re coming from, toots.”

She finds him naked in the bathroom the next morning, after a night spent trawling the streets alone, moving slow as he reaches for his trousers. His face is a mess of bruises, weeks old and brand new. Harley could have sworn he wasn’t in such bad shape the day before.

Joker reaches for the tube of white facepaint Harley keeps in the box next to the broken warehouse sink and starts applying it in meticulous layers to cover the black and blue marks littering his face. His complexion slowly evens out beneath shaking hands and she wants to sit him down and talk to him, really talk. Whatever he’s going through, there are better coping mechanisms than letting a giant rodent break you down physically till you’re little more than skin and bone and broken parts.

He doesn’t realise that she’s there, walking straight past her on his way out. The smooth white planes of his cheeks are punctuated by a line of red lipstick. He looks so handsome like this; Harley wants to kiss him but he’d probably bite her tongue off for the privilege.

The white paint sits with the cap off on the edge of the sink. Harley first bought it to cover a black eye, she had just assumed that it was running out so fast due to her own personal usage. She does her own face with practiced ease. It takes less than a minute.

They do a dry run on the Vegas heist in a seedy little place in Chinatown, the kind of event where nobody gets out alive and the whole thing is achingly, unbearably funny. The cops show up, and the Bat, and Joker and Harley are bundled off to Arkham together as a matched set to be placed like bookends at either extremity of the facility. They pass messages through a string of fellow inmates, him sending recipes for Joker toxin and the dates he plans on breaking out, her sending back sheets scribbled over in hearts in a desperate attempt to ensure he doesn’t forget her. Harley can’t stop herself, or she’s not really trying to. Absence doesn’t make her heart any fonder, just all the more love sick. She never knows if the letters she sends get read, but the ones Joker sends back get steadily more manic, till she can practically hear him screaming about the Bat.

The Bat broke Joker’s leg like a twig when he caught them. Joker had screamed and laughed and looked at him with such purpose that Harley had wanted to kill the beast herself. How hard would it be to just leave them alone?

How hard would it be for Joker to let it go?

They escape through the sewers, Harley going fist to keep a look out for Killer Croc. She’s more than happy to do it, to sacrifice everything for their freedom. That’s what love does to a person.

“What are you waiting for?” Joker whispers to the empty, smog screen sky. He insists that the Bat is abroad tonight, but the signal is out and Harley can barely see a thing through the rising fog.

Joker paces the East End and Harley tags along behind him, in search of people to play with till their puppet strings snap. The mind games are just bait to lure the Bat out of hiding. Sometimes their quarry is stupid enough to fall for it, sometimes he isn’t.

Harley can relate. Paint on, suited up. She fixes her own broken noses, thank you very much. The fire of disappointment takes a while to burn out of Joker’s chest when he’s left abandoned on the dance floor for the third time this week but when it does she threads her fingers through his. He’s always exhausted after a good rage, in need of someone to pour him a bubble bath and read him bedtime stories. This is really what she’s here for, after all. The violence is all for show.

He lets her kiss him in the morning, just before he collapses in to bed. He’s not really looking at her, and he says something about black wings as he falls beneath the covers, but it’s something.

There’s no point trying to slide in next to him, he’d only push her out when he got tired of physical affection. Harley sleeps on a pile of rags near the door, curled up like a dog without a fire place.

When she wakes, Joker is already back at his desk, mumbling about Bat poison and his plans for the evening. He asks her for his opinion on a new contraption he’s working on and she’s so happy to give it, even if he laughs at her for being stupid enough to think that it could actually work straight afterwards.

But Harley’s not stupid, not even a little bit. She watches Joker’s eyes trace the outline of something big and black that she can’t see in the window of a disused housing block. He’ll be happy to have his teeth kicked in. If only it means that the Bat is touching him, looking at him.

She throws her arms around his neck to pull him back to her and Joker pushes her into the nearest garbage can. When she wrestles herself free, he’s not looking at her and he never was. His mind is elsewhere, dreaming of a love she will never be a part of. Harley seethes and she rages and she wishes he knew that she feels exactly the same way.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from [Dela](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgmdLrKxvxE) by Jonny Clegg but honestly that song has nothing to do with the story being told here.
> 
> Comments are love. Come find me on [tumblr](http://jeffersonhairpie.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/chadfuture_)


End file.
